"NO TREASON" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spooner Lysander)

permitted to vote. Consequently, so far as voting was concerned, not more
than one-tenth, fifteenth, or twentieth of those then existing, could
have incurred any obligation to support the Constitution.

At the present time [1869], it is probable that not more than one-sixth
of the whole population are permitted to vote. Consequently, so far as
voting is concerned, the other five-sixths can have given no pledge that
they will support the Constitution.

2. Of the one-sixth that are permitted to vote, probably not more than
two-thirds (about one-ninth of the whole population) have usually voted.
Many never vote at all. Many vote only once in two, three, five, or ten
years, in periods of great excitement.

No one, by voting, can be said to pledge himself for any longer period than
that for which he votes. If, for example, I vote for an officer who is
to hold his office for only a year, I cannot be said to have thereby
pledged myself to support the government beyond that term. Therefore, on
the ground of actual voting, it probably cannot be said that more than
one-ninth or one-eighth, of the whole population are usually under any
pledge to support the Constitution. [In recent years, since 1940, the
number of voters in elections has usually fluctuated between one-third and
two-fifths of the populace.]

3. It cannot be said that, by voting, a man pledges himself to support the
Constitution, unless the act of voting be a perfectly voluntary one on his
part. Yet the act of voting cannot properly be called a voluntary one on
the part of any very large number of those who do vote. It is rather a
measure of necessity imposed upon them by others, than one of their own
choice. On this point I repeat what was said in a former number, viz.:

"In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to
be taken as proof of consent, EVEN FOR THE TIME BEING. On the
contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even
been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot
resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and
forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of
weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practice this tyranny
over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will
but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from
this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he
finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the
ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become
a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-
defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man
who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or
be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man takes
the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is
one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot -- which is
a mere substitute for a bullet -- because, as his only chance of self-